Spatial Personas are here!

INSIDE: Repair your HTC Vive, and verify your age on Meta before you lose access

Author

Mathew Abraham
April 13, 2024

Greetings, AR enthusiasts.

Guess we didn’t need to wait for VisionOS 2 for Spatial Personas; they are here in public beta.

You can repair your out of warranty HTC Vive on your own now, and Meta wants to learn how old you are.

In today’s Phantom Thread, we will look at:

  • The long awaited Spatial Personas are finally here, but with a catch.

  • iFixit will now help you DIY repair your HTC Vive headset.

  • Your Quest account might ask you for your age again

  • Create your first AR or VR app on iOS

  • 3 AR Tools

WEEKLY THREADS

Apple

The weave: Spatial Personas are here and they let you have everyone in your Facetime calls hover beside your apps, simulating a real life conversation.

The strands:

  • Apple had shown off this feature before the Vision Pro’s launch, but it was missing in the launch version of VisionOS.

  • The public beta of the feature is currently available to everyone on their Vision Pro by selecting Spatial Personas during a Facetime call.

  • Spatial Personas currently use SharePlay to share persona data, but since it is in beta, it won’t be as polished as you would expect.

The fabric: The feature is still in beta, but you might not need to wait until VisionOS 2 to start using the feature. Apple deciding to push the feature to a public beta means a full feature complete release is up next.

iFixit.com

The weave: HTC and iFixit have partnered to create guides and make official replacement parts available to everyone in what is one of the best steps HTC has taken towards Right to Repair.

The strands:

  • Any Vive owner in North America can now go to iFixit’s website and order any part you need for your out of warranty headset.

  • This is mostly intended for long term users with older headsets that are out of warranty, and HTC recommends you file a warranty claim if it hasn’t expired.

  • iFixit also has a guide that takes you through each replacement job with illustrations and you won’t need any specialized knowledge to follow any of them.

The fabric: Most VR headsets do not let their users repair it or take it apart, or at least make it very hard to take one apart. HTC doing this is a great consumer friendly decision that others in the industry should emulate.

The weave: In a move to segment content according to age groups, Meta is refreshing their age categories into three, and you will have to confirm your date of birth to continue using your Meta account.

The strands:

  • You might have received a prompt from Meta to confirm your age so that they can assign one of the three age categories to your account.

  • Once you confirm your age, you will be assigned to an Adult account (18 or above), Teen account (13-17), or Preteens account (10-12).

  • Each category has more restrictive privacy settings as you go younger, with the Preteen accounts being completely managed by their parents who decide what apps can be downloaded and used.

The fabric: The age categorization is part of a wider attempt by Meta to regulate what minors and teenagers experience on their platforms. You will have to confirm your age within 30 days or you temporarily lose access to your account until you do.

AR TUTORIAL
Create your first AR or VR app on iOS with ARKit

The weave:  iOS AR and VR apps use ARKit as a framework and integrates Unity and Unreal engines. You’ll need to set it up before you start making anything on it though.

Here’s our step-by-step guide:

  1. Have Unity set up for ARKit by changing the Build settings to iOS and make sure Development Build and ARKitScene is checked.

  2. Open Xcode, go into Buildtime and select Unity-iPhone folder.

  3. Select your Apple developer account under Team.

  4. Set the device you are developing for and click Run under the Product menu.

WEEKLY AR TOOL ROUNDUP

Featured AR tools:

  • Inkhunter - A tattoo visualization tool in AR that lets you preview how a tattoo design would look on your before you get it.

  • Glancebar - A Vision Pro widget that tracks time of day, weather, events and reminders at a glance.

  • Lava Battery - Another neat Vision Pro app that shows how much battery you have in your headset using a lava lamp that changes color.

FLASH FRAMES

Victoria VR’s app builder has integrated with AI tech from OpenAI to let you harness the power of generative AI in your VR experience creations.

Meta celebrated 10 years of hardware and software efforts with another teaser for their AR smart glass with AI integration.

Niantic has announced they will be making AR content for the Vision Pro, but it does not mean Pokemon Go would be coming to the headset anytime soon.

The educational market of VR and AR is predicted to hit $75 billion by 2033 with the fastest growth being seen in this sector among all the other markets that VR and AR covers.

Space enthusiasts are getting a great rocket visualization experience on their Vision Pros through the Pocket Rocket app.

THAT’S ALL FOR THE WEEK